Soviet Failure to Demarcate Union Republic Borders Major Source of Tension for Post-Soviet States, Russian Scholars Say

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov.6 – Moscow not only frequently changed the borders of union republics  (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/05/borders-in-post-soviet-space-were.html) but also failed to demarcate even the borders that it has announced as having been delimited, Russian scholars say.
    Instead, they point out, Soviet officials at all levels treated these borders as more symbolic than real and allowed those living in frontier regions to move back and forth and make use of resources on both sides with little regard to where the borders were said to be. In many cases, local people had little or no idea of where the border actually was.
    That has left the post-Soviet states where these incompletely marked administrative borders have become international borders in a difficult position, with serious conflicts breaking out between the countries involved and governments struggling to demarcate their borders both to eliminate borders as a source of conflict.
    Nowhere has this lack of Soviet demarcation proved more fateful to the successor states than along the 971-kilometer border between Kyrgystan and Tajikistan where there have been “more than 230” clashes in recent decades and a major effort to reach agreement on just where the border lies, according to two Russian specialists (sng.fm/dushanbe/34919-mir-druzhba-granica-pochemu-bishkek-i-dushanbe-godami-ne-mogut-podelit-territorii.html).
    Both Larisa Shashok and Komron Rakhimov of Moscow’s Center for Central Asian Research at the Academy of Sciences say the two countries hope to finalize an agreement on borders early next year, but they point out that a major reason this has taken so long was the lack of demarcation in Soviet times.
    That is an unusual but not unprecedented judgment that is often ignored by students of the region who in most cases are inclined to blame the difficulties the new states have in resolving border problems on their own nationalistic commitments rather than on the failures of the Soviet system.